Showing results by narrator "Allyson Johnson" in All Categories

In the shadows of a seismic shift in American politics comes Tom Rachman's timely and hilarious new work. Basket of Deplorables takes an incisive and satirical look at the United States in the era of Trump data breaches, liberal self-righteousness, red-hat rancor, Starbucks macchiatos, Ultimate Fighting factories, and Internet sinkholes.

What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young Black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures.

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions - clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips - and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer.

Beneath the glitter of Mardi Gras lies the sleaze of Bourbon Street; under the celestial sounds of JazzFest, the nightmare screams of a city once at war within its neighborhoods, but after Hurricane Katrina, seemingly at war with nature and the rest of the country as well. New Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European (and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation.

Titan, Wizard, and Demon have enthralled a generation of readers with adventure, humor, horror, and dazzling imagination. Now, in the epic conclusion of John Varley's masterpiece, the satellite-sized Gaea has gone completely insane. She has trapped humans in her mind. She has transformed her love of old movies into monstrous realities. She is Marilyn Monroe. She is King Kong. And she must be destroyed.

Brought up amid the luxury of plantation life, Marianne Johnston never questions her sheltered life until, driven by her conscience, she joins the Underground Railroad. Soon Marianne is living a dangerous double life, helping slaves flee by night and acting the belle by day. And nothing is riskier than her attraction to wild, heartless young Southerner Yves Chamard - while being courted by his noble older brother.

Single dad of Seattle Dr. Mark Herron can't believe anyone would celebrate their divorce. The dissolution of his marriage left him and his son with a huge hole to fill in their home - and their hearts. So when he overhears a lovely stranger and her friends celebrating the end of her marriage, he's mystified - and then intrigued - by her determination to put the past behind her. But when he learns that Tori Jones needs a job, he knows this can't be a coincidence.

There are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

Black women have higher rates of premature birth than other women in America. This cannot be simply explained by economic factors, with poorer women lacking resources or access to care. Even professional, middle-class Black women are at a much higher risk of premature birth than low-income White women in the United States. Dána-Ain Davis looks into this phenomenon, placing racial differences in birth outcomes into a historical context, revealing that ideas about reproduction and race today have been influenced by the legacy of ideas which developed during the era of slavery.

Eva Forge is the last paladin of the dead God, Morgan. Eva, forsaken by her parents and forgotten by her family, was the last child dedicated to the Cult of Morgan. Morgan, God of battle and champion of the Fraterdom, was assassinated by his jealous brother, Amon. Over time, the Cult of Morgan has been surpassed by other Gods, his blessings ignored in favor of brighter technologies and more mechanical miracles. Now, Eva watches as her new family, her Cult, crumbles around her.

UNINTERRUPTED PRESENTS: SOLO is an intimate and singular storytelling event, where athletes across different sports will share never-before-told stories connected to the theme of FAMILY FIRST. This collection of stories features: Allyson Felix, Lori King, Termarr Johnson, Gabby Douglas and Iman Shumpert alongside his older brother Ahrii.

A grim, haunted expanse of space, vast light years filled with dead, empty worlds. A dark place, the graveyard of an empire…and a frontier where vast riches can be had by those with the courage - and the luck - to survive. Andi Lafarge and the crew of Pegasus are among the elite of the strange brotherhood that ventures forth, seeking the remnants of humanity’s lost past. She and her people will face the deadliest challenges, fight constant battles, and plunge forth into the darkest corners of the lost region of space.

When Isaac Newton died in 1727 without a will, he left behind a wealth of papers that, when examined, gave his followers and his family a deep sense of unease. Some of what they contained was wildly heretical and alchemically obsessed, hinting at a Newton altogether stranger and less palatable than the one enshrined in Westminster Abbey as the paragon of English rationality. These manuscripts had the potential to undermine not merely Newton's reputation, but that of the scientific method he embodied.

When Misa Atkinson confesses to the murder of Steven Bingham, her sister's brother-in-law, for doing the unthinkable to her son, everything is turned upside down. Misa now faces jail time and the loss of her son forever, and his drug lord brother Frankie Bingham is out for revenge. Camille drops another bomb on Frankie, telling her estranged husband (and his mistress) that she is pregnant with his child. Their friends Dominique and Toya gather around Camille and Misa in their time of need, but the storm clouds have gathered over their own lives as well.

From the pulpy pages of Black Mask Magazine in the 1920s and '30s, through the film noir era of the 1940s, to today, noir fiction has lured many a reader and movie-goer away from the light and into the dark underbelly of society. Names such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain; titles like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice...these have inhabited our collective consciousness for decades. Humanity, it seems, loves the dark. And within the dark, one figure stands out: that of the femme fatale.

In Black Utopias, Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking.

Phillis Wheatley was just another child kidnapped into slavery from Senegal, until she began to show enormous intellectual promise, eventually shocking a room of Boston scholars by translating Ovid at the age of 14. Wheatley would go on to become a major voice in the American literary scene and would pave the way for African American writers to come.

A proud working-class woman, an "out" lesbian long before the Rainbow revolution, Joan Nestle has stood at the forefront of American freedom struggles from the McCarthy era to the present day. Featuring photographs and a new introduction by the author, this classic collection which intimately accounts the lesbian, feminist and civil rights movements through personal essays is available again for the first time in years.

A loving wife and a mother of three accomplished children, forty-six-year-old Trudy Marino has an uncomplicated life—until she’s blindsided by her husband’s affair. But in Trudy’s close-knit neighborhood, she’s not alone in navigating the sudden surprises in a woman’s life. Her neighbor Roberta has just lost her husband of sixty-two years and struggles with bittersweet memories and grief. Roberta’s granddaughter Jade is a divorcée who has taken up a cathartic new hobby to get over her cheating ex. And there’s Shannelle, whose creative aspirations are fracturing her marriage.

In Coming to Our Senses, cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that prevailing theories of perception, cognition, and information cannot explain how we know the world around us. Using scientific studies and true stories, McCabe shows that the ecological disasters, political paralysis, and economic failures we now face originate in our tendency to privilege cognitive processes and products over the information we access with our perceptual systems.